This is weird. I'm at a BBQ on Saturday and I'm talking to a friend who teaches linguistics. The conversation got onto a bloke from the 1970's who claimed the introduction of agriculture destroyed the world. My friend said he had dinner with this bloke and two other American fringe authors at a fringe writers convention in Sydney in 1997. One of those blokes was Terence McKenna.

I asked, but there are no memorable anecdotes that my friend could remember about Terence McKenna. As it was a fringe writer's conference, he said everyone was putting on "a show".

scrmbldggs wrote:I'd think agriculture itself not being as detrimental as the introduction of artificial fertilizers would have been?

To be frank, my friend tried to explain this other bloke's weird views, about agriculture to me. It made no sense at all. Somehow humans would have been better off if we remained hunters and gatherers. Yet simultaneously, the bloke claiming this, has flown to and from Australia on a manufactured jet and sat in a restaurant, eating normal grown agricultural produce.

scrmbldggs wrote:I'd think agriculture itself not being as detrimental as the introduction of artificial fertilizers would have been?

To be frank, my friend tried to explain this other bloke's weird views, about agriculture to me. It made no sense at all. Somehow humans would have been better off if we remained hunters and gatherers. Yet simultaneously, the bloke claiming this, has flown to and from Australia on a manufactured jet and sat in a restaurant, eating normal grown agricultural produce.

And probably didn't even bother to separate his refuse. But I could almost agree with one thing - had he said "the planet would have been better off".

Matthew Ellard wrote:Question (1B) Zeuzzz, if magic mushrooms still exist in Africa both today and 5,000,000 years ago, then is the reversion to "brutal dominance hierarchies", 12,000 year ago related to the withdrawal of magic mushrooms, as claimed by McKenna? Yes or No?

zeuzzz wrote:No

You now agree and understand that McKenna was fabricating this entire rubbish story about a "return to brutal dominance hierarchies" because magic mushroom disappeared. You have now probably now worked out that it was complete crap because modern humans were already in Europe for 90,000 years and so the fake story that mushrooms disappeared from Africa 12,000 years ago could not have effected modern humans across the planet.

You must now go to your blog and remove all these paragraphs from your "Stoned ape" claims.

Matthew Ellard wrote:Question (2A) Zeuzzz, is McKenna correct in claiming that adaptive behavioural changes will eventually end up in a species gene pool? Yes or No?

zeuzzz wrote: Your question is vague,

It is not vague and I am quoting McKenna. It is complete crap. Name one example from actual human evolution. You can't because it is complete crap.

Matthew Ellard wrote:Question (2B) Zeuzzz, Do you still claim that epigenetics allows for Lamarkian evolution from Australopithecus through to modern man, including the introduction of new mutant genes?

zeuzzz, five months ago wrote: It is essentially Lamarkian

zeuzzz wrote: Nope I do not claim that per se,

Zeuzzz. All epigenetic modifying sequences are already evolved to modify existing gene sequences. The epigentic sequences are already part of your evolved DNA. You are confusing the mechanism of how these sequences have already evolved to turn off and on already existing gene sequences with some fantasy about them inventing "new genes".

Matthew Ellard wrote:Question 3A) Zeuzzz, can you explain why modern man in Europe did not continue the process of gathering and eating magic mushrooms in Europe in this recent 50,000 year period?

zeuzzz wrote:Although not a prerequisite to the theory (mushroms are not necessary) changes in climate and environment would have changed primates diet drastically as they moved between various ecological niches over millions of years. Many of these changes would have moved them away from various diets and lifestyles inimical to positive long term cultural changes.

Stop dodging. Answer the question. There is no evidence any modern human has collected magic mushrooms as part of their regular diet. Just say it. McKenna is simply ignoring the facts for "his crap propaganda story".

zeuzzz wrote: Nope, can't ask him, he died some 16 years ago.

So we are finally getting there. You now agree that McKenna's Stoned Ape story make absolutely no sense.

Matthew Ellard wrote:Question 4A) Zeuzzz, Can you explain why McKenna claims that all hominids did this, whereas, we have identified magic mushrooms, existing all over the planet, and yet not one human, today or in archaeology, has ever been observed collecting and taking magic mushrooms as a regular part of their diet?

zeuzzz wrote: This is incorrect, there are many cultures.......

Stop dodging. Name one hominid that ate magic mushrooms as a regular part of its diet.

Matthew Ellard wrote:Question 5A Zeuzz, do you have any scientific evidence that any form of hallucinogens leads to an increased incidence of orgies in hominids or any ape on the planet ( and 1980's "Raves" don't count)

zeuzzz wrote:This was not my claim,

This claim is still on your website. Remove it immediately.

Matthew Ellard wrote:Question 5B) Zeuzz, do you have any evidence that taking hallucinogens at any dosage improves a human or apes hunting and foraging skills?

My oh my ... impossible you be. Why should I put forward a theory, that I have made ostensibly clear is not a theory but more a general hypothesis amoungst a healthy competition of other ideas, that you continually strawman my positions about left right and center here, without ever having the common decency to ask me in the process of all this bluster and bravado what I think about it? And no, asking binary yes or no questions is not how normal people speak to each other.

Lets have a quick wikipedia search on this matter, not even based on the hypothesis as a whole, just from a random hippie that repopularized the idea.

Some of this critisism will no doubt be music to your ears Matthew. I anticipate the soon to come echo chamber.

McKenna put forward a hypothesis contending that the ingestion of the psychedelic mushroom Psilocybe cubensis was one of the main transformative factors, and catalytic, in the early evolution of consciousness in Homo sapiens.[1][3][5][6][7][8]

Critical reception

One expert on drug treatment attacked McKenna for popularizing "dangerous substances". "Surely the fact that Terence McKenna says that the psilocybin mushroom 'is the megaphone used by an alien, intergalactic Other to communicate with mankind' is enough for us to wonder if taking LSD has done something to his mental faculties," Judy Corman, vice president of Phoenix House of New York, a drug treatment center, said in a letter to The New York Times in 1993.[19]

Others had trouble with his self-consciously cosmic literary style. "I suffered hallucinatory agonies of my own while reading his shrilly ecstatic prose," Peter Conrad wrote in The New York Times in a 1993 review of Mr. McKenna's book True Hallucinations.[19]

But some praised his "scholarly" approach. Biologist Richard Evans Schultes, of Harvard University, wrote in American Scientist in a 1993 review of McKenna's book Food of the Gods, that it was; "a masterpiece of research and writing" and that it "should be read by every specialist working in the multifarious fields involved with the use of psychoactive drugs." Concluding that "It is, without question, destined to play a major role in our future considerations of the role of the ancient use of psychoactive drugs, the historical shaping of our modern concerns about drugs and perhaps about man's desire for escape from reality with drugs."[88]

John Horgan in a 2012 blog post for Scientific American also commented that, Food of the Gods was "a rigorous argument...that mind-expanding plants and fungi catalyzed the transformation of our brutish ancestors into cultured modern humans."[12]

His outpouring of unique thoughts was a marvel to many. "To write him off as a crazy hippie is a rather lazy approach to a man not only full of fascinating ideas but also blessed with a sense of humor and self-parody," Tom Hodgkinson wrote in The New Statesman and Society in 1994.[19]

Some found his writing captivating. Mark Jacobson said of True Hallucinations, in a 1992 issue of Esquire Magazine that, "it would be hard to find a drug narrative more compellingly perched on a baroquely romantic limb than this passionate Tom-and-Huck-ride-great-mother-river-saga of brotherly bonding," adding "put simply, Terence is a hoot!"[10]

Wired called him a "charismatic talking head" who was "brainy, eloquent, and hilarious"[27] and Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead also said that he was "the only person who has made a serious effort to objectify the psychedelic experience."[19]

zeuzzz wrote:A reality that we have to live with is that genetics and neuroscience have not yet identified the events, or confleunce of events, that enable us to differnatiate the homo sapien brain from those of our hominid cousins. Brain size and the complexity of the brain is not easily transferred to the phenomenon of conciousness or direct experience.

From my perspective, the best explanations emerge from two principles:

1. Architecture: The connectivity and organization of the physical human brain, mainly noted with the increase in density of particular structures, has enabled the activity needed for more comprehensive modelling of consciousness.

In regards to the architecture argument: basically any animal you can name has a brain that resembles (at some level) other animals'. Of course there are differences that enable the unique neurophysiological features distinguishing the sensory modalities of a bird and a cat - and the closer two creatures are phylogenetically, the more similar their nervous systems will be - but we all share a common kernel of neurophysiology, particularly as you move posteriorly towards the hindbrain. This is similar to the fact that many houses in the US & UK have kitchens, bedrooms, bathrooms, etc. However, the sizes of rooms vary between houses - as do the sizes & densities of common brain structures between different species. For example, humans have a much more complex neocortex than any other primate, the functional consequences of which being still a matter of investigation. Similarly, humans have considerable emphasis on frontal structures - ostensibly enabling greater inhibitory control over the impulses emerging from less integrative midbrain structures, as well as integrating a greater variety of signals from other brain regions (at a minimum). This principle is almost certainly true elsewhere in the brain, and can easily be explained by mutations resulting in altered gene expression, transcriptional regulation, post-transnational modification, etc - all of which sculpt a nervous system with much better integration of past experience and current incoming sensory data, resulting in far greater predictive power and planning.

Regarding the mutations argument: this is basically irrefutable in light of the theory of evolution. At some point, mutations occurred that enabled all of the above to happen at some point. The main challenge is to tro to identify which particular mutations were likely to yield the relative differences. I like the work coming out of the Wray lab at Duke, identifying mutations in the proteins responsible for trafficking glucose. In a nutshell, there are different glucose transporters present in brain and muscle. When comparing the relative activities of brain and muscle glucose transporters in humans and chimpanzees, it turns out that the human brain-specific transporter is 3.2X more active, while chimp muscle-specific glucose transporters are 1.6X more active (which perhaps makes intuitive sense, given how much stronger chimps are than humans).

In humans (and not chimps), regulatory sequences for muscle and brain-focused glucose transporters have accumulated more mutations than expected by chance - implying the occurrence of some selective pressure to induce accelerated evolution here. Similarly, Kasia Bozek at Max Planck has shown that the variation in metabolism of chimp and human brains is 4X higher than would be expected by our phylogenetic proximity (we're more different than would be expected). Finally, Debra Silver and Greg Wray (obviously crushing it) at Duke have found that a particular regulatory sequence (named HARE5), which regulates very early embryonic nervous system development, seems to be associated with dramatic increases in brain size - and the human variant is substantially more effective at swelling developing brains than the chimpanzee.

So, while I say that we don't have the story at a granular level, we're already finding many of the players and plot lines. This is the kind of work that will reveal the actual steps along the trajectory that's resulted in the human brain - and while it's perhaps not as romantic to many people who prefer a simpler and more intuitive explanation, it emerges from the actual mechanisms that are the foundation of consciousness.

In terms of differences in behavior, we can debate the relative densities and complexities of the anatomical structures that are the foundation for behavior (i.e. the ventral midbrain & striatum, prefrontal structures, dorsal hindbrain, epithalamus) - though the anthropological and sociological perspectives are likely more interesting to more people.

zeuzzz wrote: How did the rest of that above linked to conversation go for you?

Really well Zeuzzz, because I could say with confidence that Australopithecus Afarensis had the same brain as our common ape ancestor after entering the savannah for 2,000,000 years. You didn't know that.

In fact, you aren't able to identify one hominid species in the entire span of human evolution. You also still don't know what evolution is yet.

zeuzzz wrote:Getting knowledge from you is like squeezing water from a stone sometimes.

You keep asking me why human brains are so different to apes. The question does not make any sense. They are two totally different species in two totally different environments, that separated 5,000,000 years ago.

If you bothered to read one book on hominid evolution you would be asking me why Homo habilis was so different to Australopithicus afarensis and what happened to all the extinct other Australopithicine species like Bosie. You keep going on about diet, but never once looked at the diet of the various Australopithicines., which we know from their teeth.

I have actually explained this to you many many times and you simply ignore facts and revert to talking about magic mushrooms. It is a waste of my time.

Bosie.jpg

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Just watched the fantastic David Attenboroughs two parter on BBC TV: "Birth of the Animals" (sic) which first hour is about vertibrates, and second hour about mammals and hoomans. The photography and animations are top notch. The information provided is well trod except for me the very earliest forms of the first branches of life. Even then as they show the earliest mammal ancestor..... huge gap from the reptiles from which it arose. Everything so "transitional" from one species to the next..........awesome to see it in the fossil record brought to life with animation.

I don't recall ever seeing such a basic show on plants. Then come to think of it: mosses and lichens. Yes, I see a slow transition path there from sea shore tidal rocks onto land.... more likely than evolution from fresh water bogs? Or not, or both?

Its a miracle.......... in every sense.................... ha, ha:::::> except god. That does crack me up, and makes me marvel. Just no faith in the future. The next cockroach to arise will be...........................

Real Name: bobbo the existential pragmatic evangelical anti-theist and Class Warrior.Asking: What is the most good for the most people?Sample Issue: Should the Feds provide all babies with free diapers?

zeuzzz wrote:Matt, why is Homo habilis so different to Australopithicus afarensis and what happened to all the extinct other Australopithicine species like Bosie?

OK. So you now understand that the Australopithicines were a number of species that all shared the same common ancestor and all lived in the savanah around 5,000,000 to 2,500,000 year ago. You now understand that they did not have larger cranial capacities than our common ancestor with apes. You now understand that due to the normal dynamics of evolution, different physiological adaptions in Australopithicines had evolved to fill different environmental niches in the savannah. You now understand that higher amounts of protein (prey bone marrow for scavenging) existed in the environment, offering opportunity for the species to evolve into larger protein consumers. You are now aware that one late species of Australopithecus was smashing the remains of already killed prey to obtain bone marrow using stones. (They were running bi-pedal scavengers and not big strong hunters)

Australopithecus Bosie was a vegetarian. You can tell by its teeth, cranial crest and muscle connection points around the jaw. Australopithecus Bosie had to consume non-meat food continuously to maintain a steady protein uptake equal to its omnivore cousins Afarensis and Africanus. This was simply a dead end. Any mutations, in this species, offering a larger brain phenotype, would be detrimental as the protein input simply didn't exist. When the larger, more intelligent, Homo Habilis evolved 2,500,000 years ago, Bosie could not survive the competition. A. Bosie only became extinct 1,000,000 years ago and was still around when Homo erectus evolved.

This briefly brings me back to magic mushrooms. If the vegetarian A.Bosie gathered magic mushrooms while protein eating A.Afarensis did not....and A.Bosie becomes extinct, then that alone ends the stoned ape fairy tale.

So, moving along to 2,500,000 year ago, there is a very new species that evolved from the Australopithecine species that used rocks to smash bones. This new species is called "handyman" Homo habilis. because it not only uses stones but it it starting to shape the stones for different purposes. Simultaneously we have the first significant growth in the brain size. The bulge of Broca's area, essential for speech, is visible in one homo habilis brain cast

homo Habilis.jpg

Can you see the direct evolutionary adaption improvement from Australopithecus Afarensis simply smashing bones with available rocks to its descendent, Homo Habilis creating specific rock tools, and the changes to the brain regarding understanding topology and activities that require preparation? Can you see that communication is now starting to become advantageous, because stone toll making is not an innate activity and technology has to be communicated? This is when the larynx first drops as volume is no longer the main purpose of vocal identification.

groups-langauge-tools-oldowan.jpg

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I do love Darwin. Science. The interplay of genome and environment with emphasis on how much more involved our dna is. We know a lot, we don't know it all yet. The link is to one page regarding how there is a second layer of info in dna heretofore not recognized...kinda like finding out Junk DNA still holds a lot of secrets. Turns out: how dna folds itself determines much of what goes on.

Real Name: bobbo the existential pragmatic evangelical anti-theist and Class Warrior.Asking: What is the most good for the most people?Sample Issue: Should the Feds provide all babies with free diapers?

A primate stumbling across a strong natural psychedelic would have made it instantly not just a pivotal experience of their own lives but would have shared the foraging technique / information with others and probably built a religion around it. A shamanic religion of worshipping the agent in question and the state of mind it induced, rather than the weak religious hand-downs we now inherit from the watered down monotheistic religions. That promise so much, yet deliver so little.

There are now tried and tested scientifically verifiable ways to induce mystical and trancendant states with repeatability and medical efficacy.

The types of fertility cults we see in the pagan history that gave birth to all the monotheistic religions show vague traces of this. Also the vedic cults. But with time it seems that information was lost. And that's just 3000-4000 years ago, we've a ~200,000 year framework to work with if the hypothesis is correct. Or a million year one if you take a more extreme view about it's role and significance.

Talk about the role of psychedelic agents to induce creativity, new behaviour patterns, abstract thought, and other things, is almost a separate academic issue each in varied and different fields than the fact that apes experiencing them would almost certainly build *some* kind of religion or beleif system around them to help explain the profundity of the states of mind they induce. In many modern cultures they were demonized rather than worshipped out of fear (people using or sharing them them were drowned as witches or wizards) but in the past the opposite could have been true.

zeuzzz wrote:We finally have some initial results coming in. And they are much as I expected. The top graph is a cumulative graph of all traditional treatments to depression, all of which (except therapy/placebo) require a daily regimen of expensive pharmaceutical drugs. Depression obviously being just one of a multitude of various mental ailments people suffer with. The one below is that is from the patients with depression treated with just two one off psilocybin therapy sessions measured at two weeks and then later at three months.

Pislocybin:

Every patient in the study had clinically diagnosed treatment resistant depression, not average depression. It should also be noted they were not simply prescribed it and given it to take away; they took it in a quasi clinical setting with a therapist. I am not saying everyone should suddenly take magic mushrooms. It's not quite that simple.

Matt it's somewhat amazing (considering how long this thread has been going on) how you have not yet realized that as gastronomy evolved so concomitantly would have the ability for primates to gauge threshold, normal, high and mystical doses of whatever agent they wanted to include in their diet for whatever desired effect.

Showing me a video of some scientists giving a bunch of apes god knows what dose of LSD proves nothing when you are talking about evolutionary and culturally learned foraging and dosing behaviours. Mainly as you can not get high from Ergot without some kind of more advanced extraction and man-made synthesis of the precursors, so LSD is the wrong drug to test in the first place. What was the dose? I bet it was too high, and I bet the monkeys has no prior experience with lower doses. Maybe it does show a few things, that I pointed out before, as in it seemed to break down their heirarchical dominance structure.

zeuzzz wrote:Matt it's somewhat amazing (considering how long this thread has been going on) how you have not yet realized that as gastronomy evolved so concomitantly would have the ability for primates to gauge threshold, normal, high and mystical doses of whatever agent they wanted to include in their diet for whatever desired effect.

No zeuzzz. That is absolute crap that you made up on the spot. The evolved reflex after eating "off food" in animals, is called vomiting.

Do you want to watch some videos of primates vomiting to confirm this?

zeuzzz wrote: .....when you are talking about evolutionary and culturally learned foraging and dosing behaviours.

Zeuzzz. There is no evolutionary innate behaviour to gather magic mushrooms in any primates. You are going downhill again and reverting to your delusional framework.

Zeuzzz, you got better for a while and even read my post on hominid evolution, and understood most of it. Develop your new theory from good science and do some basic study concerning evolution in hominids. Do not revert to trying to justify a fantasy framework of nonsense, that McKenna made up, to sell books and later admitted was complete nonsense.

We simply have too many cult followers trying to justify their own nonsense, on the forum at the moment.

meh whatever Matt. You are obviously still reacting to my posts rather than thinking about them with an open mind.

I am still re-writing the theory, probably going to be titled something like 'pre historic shamanism; a scientific anthropogeny plausability review' but it's still going to take months. I've nearly written enough to publish a book now as I've scoured my new books on the issue.

Matthew Ellard wrote: There is no evolutionary innate behaviour to gather magic mushrooms in any primates.

The use of psychoactive drugs is common in human societies, from advanced (modern) to the most 'primitive'. Sometimes it is raised to cult status. Why would you state that there is nothing innate in this behavior?

zeuzzz wrote:meh whatever Matt. You are obviously still reacting to my posts rather than thinking about them with an open mind.

I am still re-writing the theory, probably going to be titled something like 'pre historic shamanism; a scientific anthropogeny plausability review' but it's still going to take months. I've nearly written enough to publish a book now as I've scoured my new books on the issue.

The theory is dead until you can provide a mechanism by which evolutionary changes can occur. If you think epigenetics is a back door, you are merely demonstrating your own lack of understanding of epigenetics.

. . . with the satisfied air of a man who thinks he has an idea of his own because he has commented on the idea of another . . . - Alexandre Dumas 'The Count of Monte Cristo"

There is no statement so absurd that it has not been uttered by some philosopher. - Cicero

Matthew Ellard wrote: There is no evolutionary innate behaviour to gather magic mushrooms in any primates.

OlegTheBatty wrote: Why would you state that there is nothing innate in this behavior?

There is not one recorded example in the history of the universe of a non-human ape ever gathering magic mushrooms.

In the scientific method, you introduce a hypothesis to explain an observed phenomena.

What phenomena are you introducing this hypothesis to explain?

I can also deny there is an innate behaviour for non-human apes to make banana cakes from primitive food sources......as this also has never actually happened.

The topic is about apes that are in the human clade, specifically those in the line leading to humans. We have examples of members of that clade gathering magic mushrooms. Stating categorically that members of that clade never did anything similar in recorded history is silly. Extrapolating from apes that are not in the line to humans is irrelevant.

The point is, it is quite possible that some australopithecines used psychoactive herbs. It doesn't prove a damn thing vis-a-vis our evolution, but the behaviour is certainly possible.

. . . with the satisfied air of a man who thinks he has an idea of his own because he has commented on the idea of another . . . - Alexandre Dumas 'The Count of Monte Cristo"

There is no statement so absurd that it has not been uttered by some philosopher. - Cicero

The desire for animals to intoxicate themselves is innate, we see it all across the animal kingdom, from dolphins, reindeer, elephants, cats, beetles and toads.

If anything you can argue that humans (maybe primates) have a higher proclivity to intoxicate themselves vs other animals due to their slight cognitive advantages. Just look at how monkeys behave at resorts where alcohol is lying around. Being aboreal tree dwelling creatures that get most of their food from high in the canopies doesn't offer them much chance to come across coprophilic mushrooms, as these tend to be only in grassland areas where ungulate animals graze on grass. As the climate changed we evolved out of the trees and onto the savanna to hunt such animals over millions of years, thus the chances of a primate foraging to find this would have gone up, from unlikely to almost certain.

In terms of potential evolutionary advantages there are a multitude at each dosage level, whether we start at the threshold visual acuity and hunting angle or the hierarchy dissolution and increase in libido leading to more offspring thus an outbreeding and out competing of other troops; with this however also comes a lot of potential evolutionary disadvantages. I've some fourty listed. Weighing up the advantages and disadvantages is hard. My thoughts are that many ecological and environmental niches opened up over long evolutionary time scales that would have accentuated the positives to the users to the evolutionary detriment of the other members of the species that did not.

And the theory need not be mushroom centric (even if they fit better than most other candidates); other similar strong psychedelic agents (like ayahuasca) only able to be combined, cooked and taken ritualistically in the correct way once such cooking knowledge was known by an intelligent primate and thereafter culturally inherited are just some of the other candidates that could have catalyzed cognitive function and human type imagination in our ancestors.

Last edited by zeuzzz on Fri Jun 17, 2016 12:13 am, edited 3 times in total.

OlegTheBatty wrote: We have examples of members of that clade gathering magic mushrooms.

You are now saying that modern humans taking magic mushrooms at dance parties is the phenomena you are using to claim apes gathered magic mushrooms to allow humans to evolve to go to dance parties?

There is no-evidence of any non-human ape, current or historical gathering magic mushroom, innately, consciously or under gun-point from aliens.

OlegTheBatty wrote:The point is, it is quite possible that some australopithecines used psychoactive herbs. It doesn't prove a damn thing vis-a-vis our evolution, but the behaviour is certainly possible.

Apart form the hard evidence supplied in this thread, for two years, that taking magic mushrooms is detrimental to all the evolved skills that homo habilis acquired. Australopithecus still had the brains the size of a monkey for 2.5 million years and had physiological changes to the body.

OlegTheBatty wrote: We have examples of members of that clade gathering magic mushrooms.

You are now saying that modern humans taking magic mushrooms at dance parties is the phenomena you are using to claim apes gathered magic mushrooms to allow humans to evolve to go to dance parties?

There is no-evidence of any non-human ape, current or historical gathering magic mushroom, innately, consciously or under gun-point from aliens.

Written records are recent - 9k years tops. Anyone who observed anything before that forgot to write it down, I guess.

OlegTheBatty wrote:The point is, it is quite possible that some australopithecines used psychoactive herbs. It doesn't prove a damn thing vis-a-vis our evolution, but the behaviour is certainly possible.

Apart form the hard evidence supplied in this thread, for two years, that taking magic mushrooms is detrimental to all the evolved skills that homo habilis acquired. Australopithecus still had the brains the size of a monkey for 2.5 million years and had physiological changes to the body.

So what?

The fact that using psychoactive herbs is detrimental to survival skills is irrelevant if the herbs were used when not practicing survival skills. Monkeys and apes have daily down times with grooming sessions etc when they are neither foraging nor protecting the troop. Observation of modern humans (including the Yanomamo) using psychoactive drugs shows that most such use occurs at times of relaxation, although the DUI phenomenon shows that it is not 100%.

I'm not arguing in favor of McKenna, which is utter nonsense; I am arguing your sloppy debunking.

. . . with the satisfied air of a man who thinks he has an idea of his own because he has commented on the idea of another . . . - Alexandre Dumas 'The Count of Monte Cristo"

There is no statement so absurd that it has not been uttered by some philosopher. - Cicero